WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Easter Sunday appeared to rule out efforts to revive deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who were brought illegally to the United States as children, tweeting “NO MORE DACA DEAL!”
The president issued a series of combative statements on Twitter, centering on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as well as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he described as a “cash cow” for Mexico. At the same time, he railed against what he described as a dangerous lack of security on the U.S. southern border.
In a trio of tweets, Trump also asserted that Mexicans “laugh at our dumb immigration laws,” and suggested that U.S. Immigration and Customs agents were being improperly constrained from carrying out their duties.
The tone of the president’s holiday tweets differed markedly from the sentiments of goodwill commonly expressed by previous U.S. chief executives on national or religious occasions.
But frustrated by Congress’ refusal to embrace his legislative agenda and apparently egged on by conservative outlets like Fox News, the president in recent days has embraced a more freewheeling, confrontational leadership style, even by his standards.
In addition to firing two of his Cabinet members in tweets last month, Trump on Thursday gave a rambling speech in Ohio in which he surprised his own advisers by saying the U.S would soon halt military operations in Syria and suggesting he would use the upcoming nuclear talks with N. Korea to extract a better trade deal with S. Korea.
In his Easter tweets, Trump vented frustration over one of his campaign’s central talking points, the border wall that he repeatedly said Mexico would pay for. Congress has so far provided only limited funds for the wall project, leading Trump to reportedly weigh other avenues, including diverting money allocated to the U.S. military.
The president has made on-again, off-again efforts to use the “Dreamers” as bargaining chips in his bid to build the border wall, and he publicly vented anger over an omnibus spending measure he signed last week because it included only a small slice of funding for it.
Trump announced last fall that he would terminate the Obama-era DACA program, generating fear and panic among several hundred thousand enrollees in the program. He challenged Congress to come up with a new and better version of the program, which provides temporary protections from deportation and work permits for them.
But with the fate of the Dreamers hanging in the balance, the president then rejected a carefully crafted bipartisan immigration deal, questioning during one acrimonious meeting with lawmakers why the United States should allow immigration from Haiti and African countries he considered to be “shitholes.”
Trump is insisting that any relief for Dreamers be tied to billions of dollars for the border wall as well as strict new limits on legal immigration to the U.S. Lawmakers have been unable to agree on such a plan.